Cape clarinetist has chance to shine with symphony orchestra

Thursday

Jan 31, 2013 at 2:00 AMJan 31, 2013 at 11:00 PM

"I was chosen by the clarinet," said Monika Woods of Brewster, the only resident of Cape Cod to win one of eight semi-finalist slots in the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra’s "New England Concerto Competition" on Feb. 9.

“I was chosen by the clarinet,” said Monika Woods of Brewster, the only resident of Cape Cod to win one of eight semi-finalist slots in the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra’s “New England Concerto Competition” on Feb. 9.

She is also the only clarinetist, the only website designer, and, no doubt, the only one of the eight who speaks both Hungarian and Romanian (besides excellent English and a little Spanish and French), and most certainly the only one who moved to the Cape from Transylvania.

Even as a child in that region that has belonged back and forth to Hungary and Romania and has even been an independent kingdom, Woods was “very interested in sound,” she said. She recalled tying strings across furniture to hear the sounds they made when she plucked them. Another time, she said, she squeezed her grandmother’s plastic medicine bottle just to hear the sounds it could make.

Her parents, whom she said were not especially musical, recognized her talent and interest early and had her take piano lessons to give her a foundation. Then one day when she was about 10, her father saw an ad in a newspaper, “right after communism was ended,” she recalled. A new boarding school to teach music was starting up, and her father asked her, “Would you like to go?”

Although life in the dormitory (run by another school) was no fun, Woods said, with eight girls from fifth to eighth grades living in one room, “the music school itself was really good and gave us great support.” There, she said, the faculty looked at “certain physicalities” in each pupil and recommended which instruments they might like to learn. For her, the choice was oboe or clarinet.

There was only one oboe at the school, Woods said, and she was so influenced by the teaching of communist conformity that she reached for the clarinet so that she could go to class with another girl “and I wouldn’t stand out.”

On Saturday, Feb. 9, at 1:30 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center at Barnstable High School, Woods, as one of the semi-finalists, will, like the others, have no choice but to stand out to try to win a place in the finals, the orchestra’s Classics V concert May 4 at 8 p.m. and May 5 at 3 p.m. Snow date for the semi-finals is Feb. 10.

Her offering at the semi-finals (which she and the other seven attained by submitting a performance video, an essay, and a bio) will be Carl Maria von Weber’s Concertino in E flat major, op. 26, in this case arranged for piano and clarinet. Tickets are $10 and the audience will vote on their top three solo choices.

Video views of the semi-finals and voting will be available online Feb. 12-19.

The finals, at regular orchestra prices of $27 TO 64, will showcase the three finalists in Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. According to symphony publicity, “The audience alone will determine who will be the next symphony star” for a performance in a later season.

Woods first saw Cape Cod as a summer worker in the last decade. “Some of my first performances [on the Cape] were on the streets of Provincetown,” she recalled, and at art openings there. She and her husband and their 3-1/2-year-old daughter travel to the Cape-tip for a week every year. “I like my daughter to play with kids who have two daddies,” she said.

Woods and her husband team up to work in media production. “We do a lot of audio books for educational publishers,” she said. “I think that reading music makes me detail-oriented, which is helpful” in such recordings, as is her facility in languages other than English when she reads poetry.

The couple also host evenings of music and improvisational theater in their home. He’s a jazz guitarist and composer, who sometimes expands into piano and flute. “And maybe because we have a 3-½-year-old ourselves,“ Woods said with a laugh, “we don’t mind teaching music to children that age,” She said that, as appropriate, they give lessons in their own home or the child’s, or in schools. She said that her daughter, born two months early and very healthy, “just couldn’t wait to get moving” and has shown an early aptitude for dance, gymnastics, and yoga.

Woods also does benefit concerts, often for the Unitarian-Universalist church in Brewster, which has undergone a recent renovation and which maintains a close relationship with a sister church in Transylvania. The Unitarian church has roots in the region that go back for centuries. Usually she performs with pianist Deborah Geithner. Children’s and women’s services have also benefited from their musical offerings, often at Geithner’s waterfront home.

Woods learned early in her musical education that her favorite composer is Claude Debussy. As a clarinetist, a role model for her is Sabina Meyer, who was, perhaps, she said, the first woman to play with the Berlin Philharmonic and who struggled with resistance of the formerly all-male orchestra to her gender.

Monika Woods said that she is “excited and nervous” about the semi-finals, and eager for an opportunity to play with the symphony’s artistic director and conductor Jung-Ho Pak. “Performing with the CCSO would be ‘the chance of a lifetime’,” she said in a press release from the orchestra.”

And she loves her life on Cape Cod. “I try to nourish my creativity” with Bikram yoga, a form of the meditation practiced in a room that is heated to a sweat-inducing temperature, and play with her active child. “I have a life filled with music and joy with my daughter,” said the woman chosen by the clarinet.

The Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra can be reached at 508-362-1111 or at capesymphony.org

Seven more semifinalists

These artists have also been invited to perform at the semi-finals for a soloist spot with the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra: